5 Proven Product Management Frameworks Successful Companies Use

Leading companies such as Amazon and Spotify have a reputation for delivering exceptional products worldwide, but this is not merely a stroke of luck. Behind the scenes, these organizations put in consistent effort to create and follow clear product management frameworks that help them develop their products. These frameworks provide teams with a collective way to expand and build their products steadily over time.

Without a well-defined product management framework, it can be challenging to replicate the success of previous products. Imagine trying to bake a cake without a recipe. You may have seen someone do it on YouTube or even memorized the steps, but when it comes to running a large bakery with multiple employees, you need a recipe to ensure consistency and success.

To thrive and succeed like leading companies such as Amazon, Spotify, and Flipkart, you need to create or utilize a product management framework. In this article, we'll explore the product management frameworks used by five successful organizations to create great products.

These frameworks offer valuable insights into how to approach product discovery, prioritization, and execution effectively. So, grab a cup of coffee, and let's dive into how you can use these frameworks to create exceptional products.

1. Examine your product at each level to give the better user experience

User experience should be the top priority when developing a product, and the development team should thoroughly test each feature to ensure it meets customers' needs and is user-friendly. Spotify understands the importance of user experience and tests and measures all deliverables to provide a unique customer experience.

Spotify's development teams are organized into autonomous squads, each consisting of six to twelve employees who collaborate from development to production. The squads function like mini startups, with each mission focused on improving a specific aspect of Spotify's product. This structure allows for sorted, frequent, and decoupled releases, enabling each squad to concentrate on its specific goal without disrupting others' work.

Each squad has a lead responsible for organizing the squad based on the mission. This clear structure on what to work on and how to deliver it leads to Spotify's best delivering product experience. Their approach is not only to provide a better product but also to do it in a risk-free and cost-effective way. They experiment with features and evaluate how they work and affect people before shipping them.

Spotify's working model consists of four stages: think about what works best, build that in a better way that people love, ship it with confidence, and tweak and optimize.

During the discovery stage, teams brainstorm ideas, evaluate problems, and test concepts. This stage is crucial as features released without proper vetting can lead to unhappy customers. In the next stage, the squad develops their minimum viable product (MVP) and tests it on a small subset of users to gather feedback. They also take time to assess the quality of their code and design.

Before shipping features, Spotify tests with a minimum number of users and takes analytics on how those people enjoy the feature. If the feature is successful, it will be rolled out to the entire user base. If not, the plan will be regenerated from the beginning. In the final stage of the development cycle, the squad spends a lot of time taking analytics, evaluating the data, and making tweaks and adjustments to the released feature. They plan for improvement and optimize for even better performance.

2. Amazon’s “working backward” method gains a lot of attraction 

“Working backward,” the term refers to Amazon starting to focus on the finished product. Now you might have many questions revolving in your mind “what? How? How to do work with the finished product?”. Right? Read on.

Amazon starts any new process by explaining in short what they hope users and the media will react when they get their hands on it.

Amazon does not begin by outlining a new product’s infused features or capacities. At this point, they concentrate on the customer reaction they’re hoping to bring out.

When a product manager comes up with a new idea for a product improvement or product feature, they make arrangements for an internal press release that announces the completed product. No one will work on any development part at this stage.

The press release concentrates on customer issues and how the solution does not work for that problem. From there, they’ll explain how the new production workflow will blow away all the existing solutions.

These press releases are not just rough notes of an idea; product managers have a considerable responsibility to evaluate them until they understandably explain how the product will help a customer.

If a product manager failed to write an acceptable press release, they would scrap the idea. The standard rule is that if the press release is complex to write or daunting to explain, the finished product will not hit success. Amazon needs all of its products easy to know and simple to use. With those goals, it should be simple to write a press release that makes sense even without the finished product.

Once the top management team approves a press release, the product team utilizes it as a product roadmap for their development process.

3. The even-steven approach by Typeform’s product delivery

Typeform utilizes two equal parts of the product management framework.

• The first half concentrates on product discovery.
• The second half of their framework majorly concentrates on delivery.

Discovery is known for identifying issues, collaborating solutions, and evaluating solutions with an experimental product.

Once a feature idea clears the Discovery process, then it moves to the delivery process, which undergoes these four steps:

• Scope
• Execution
• Measurement
• Iteration

What sets Typeform’s framework apart is its exceptional approach to MVP’s. They don’t depend on just one version. Instead, they categorize the MVP into three stages:

1. Experimental product – The experimental product is the quickest way to get pieces of information on an idea. To not pay huge time on building an MVP, the earliest experimental product might be something as simple as a precaution test.
2. Existing product – A “existing” product is an original product that early adopters will utilize without incentivizing. In this phase, the product has basic functionality and may lack full complete implementation, but the primary purpose is to gather data and feedback. Typeform does this to figure out whether it’s worth spending hours building the entire product.
3. Lovable product – This is the product that users will love. They’ll refer their friends about it and are planning to take up a premium plan. It’s still not fully completed, but it’s the nearest stage to meet the product at this stage.

Categorizing your MVP will guide you and get useful feedback and data during every phase of the cycle. In this way, you can utilize a much more evaluated approach to providing your customers’ needs.

4. Understand your users and fix their problems ASAP

Did you know? GoGoVan’s most significant advantage is that they listen to their customers and quickly respond to their issues. Yes, they do a great job here and are thriving as a better product in the market.

GoGoVan aligns its product teams into various business objectives. Each team works on one objective, which permits the member on each team to get deep insights into their vision and goals.

They initiate the product discovery process based on three pillars:

• User interviews
• Sales interviews
• Usage data

Product managers pay an ample amount of their time for collaborating with users and analyzing what they need on sales calls. They aim to get the most in-depth understanding of their customers. They also take usage data to explore where the blockers exist. They utilize all this information to build a better solution to address each problem area.

Once they’ve determined the problem and find the solution for it, GoGoVan categories which features will have the highest demand on their users and then starts building the right feature.

Before they begin the development process, GoGoVan checks from the customer’s perspective one more time. They review the solutions to iterate if it’s the simplest solution or it can be improved better. Once they conclude that they’ve found a simple solution, they still don’t begin developing anything. There’s one last step to go, and that is more important.

Before GoGoVan pays any time to develop a product, they analyze success metrics, which must link back to the single vision for their team. Evaluating these metrics prevents any instant reactions when the data begins pouring in.

At this stage, GoGoVan takes the solution into development. Once it’s completed and released to customers, they go back and start evaluating the success metrics. If the product feature isn’t hitting their expectation, it’ll be regenerated with improvement ideas.

5. Thrive as a better product with Shopify’s growth framework

Shopify utilizes various frameworks and alignments across many of its teams. The most crucial is the product growth framework. Its goal is to develop the adoption of a product, not just to leave by building it.

The product growth framework extensively has famous eight steps:

Align your company – First, you need to know your company’s stage and your currently undergoing product.

• Is your product works well in the product/market fit
• Have you launched an MVP?
• Whatever it may be, analyze it.

Determine your goal – This is also the crucial one that you have to analyze ahead of time.

• What's the strategic goal of your product?
• Have you defined profitability, new users, or something else?
• Structuring all these ahead of time will help you determine what your product’s exact needs to do to drive growth.

Structure the funnel – Never forget to take a comprehensive look on

• What’s the process that customers will take to begin using your product?
• Are they going to be current or new users?
• Modeling your funnel will also help you know in-deep of what areas you need to grow yet.

Define your metrics – You need to fix a metric that helps you know whether you’re moving in the correct direction. Sometimes, your measures improve immediately, or at least vertically, check this out.

Develop a prioritization flow – Get insights from each employee working on this product about what features they think will create a more beneficial impact for your customers. Everyone in your team will have various ideas about prioritization, which is why it’s crucial to hear from multiple people.

Set a defined target – Targets will not come under your goals or deadlines, but they’re the crucial milestones to complete in the near term that you decided. They help keep your team on track and working toward your metrics and your strategic goal.

Step to product growth execution – Effective execution accelerates each phase of product growth. You want to work closely with your team to build a robust process for all stages of product development, from development to delivery.

Build a multidisciplinary team – To make all the above points effectively, you need strong team skills in product, engineering, design, data, and marketing, covering all the areas. It doesn't mean that you compulsorily want one person dedicated to a single task, but your entire team should cover these crucial skills.

Utilizing this practical framework will give you a systematic way to thrive your product. Product leaders used this framework at various companies, which means it’s simple to adopt, and you can use it at your company.

Grow consistently

Consumers will keep on noticing if you create one great product that helps them in some way to do their job effectively. But if you take a look at your product rarely, they’ll forget about your product and move on to the similar thing that comes along.

Constant Growth is the only choice to develop your brand, which creates not only loyal users but also creates a strong relationship with you. It’s one of the best reasons why Spotify, Amazon, and the others are so popular. They continuously deliver great products by following their frameworks.

I hope the Product management frameworks mentioned above will help you deliver great products like most successful companies thriving better now.